While using light pressure to move something in the same direction as light is well-understood, using beams to pull objects is a bit more difficult.
Now, a couple of Davids from New York University – Ruffner and Grier, respectively – have demonstrated just that. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, and available in …

COMMENTS

Portal 2

Blown away...

I don't know if it's journalists keeping a closer watch on scientific papers/press releases, more scientists doing awesome stuff, or that we (science/society) are in a rich run of form for this type of thing, but on a weekly basis there is something new, totally mind-blowingly amazeballs being reported on.

This is one of those moments. The video of Curiosity's descent another. The analysis of Vesta. Pretty much anything Musk does.

I missed the moon landings by 11 years, but where we're going seems even more incredible.

Sounds like nano-engineering is go...

With a suitable set-up, this sounds like a feasible approach to particle scale nano-engineering as an (admittedly slow) real-time process. I can see chemists getting pretty excited about this sort of manipulative ability, wrt creating compunds with specific physical arrangements (ie specific chiral options etc.).

How long before we can set up arrays of these to custom manufacture components from bins of single elements, I wonder? :)